Gavin the Medievalist tells us about one of the earliest and most significant poems of the famous English yeoman Robin Hood. This is a 15th century poem of 456 stanzas that is remarkably engaging. Gavin reads four stanzas to give us a feel for the verbiage then recounts the rest of the tale in his own words.
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Haven’t settled to catching up with it yet, but thanks for this in particular and Gavin in general – lots of interesting-looking videos on his channel (with quite a bit of Tolkien among them)!
Interestingly enough (for me, anyway), I came to this while finally catching with William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball (1888), and the dream-time-traveller reporting in chapter two “‘Yea,’ said a third, ‘hearken a stave of Robin Hood; maybe that shall hasten the coming of one I wot of.’ And he fell to singing in a clear voice, for he was a young man, and to a sweet wild melody, one of those ballads which in an incomplete and degraded form you have read perhaps. My heart rose high as I heard him, for it was concerning the struggle against tyranny for the freedom of life, how that the wildwood and the heath, despite of wind and weather, were better for a free man than the court and the cheaping-town; of the taking from the rich to give to the poor; of the life of a man doing his own will and not the will of another man commanding him for the commandment’s sake. The men all listened eagerly, and at whiles took up as a refrain a couplet at the end of a stanza with their strong and rough, but not unmusical voices. As they sang, a picture of the wild-woods passed by me, as they were indeed, no park-like dainty glades and lawns, but rough and tangled thicket and bare waste and heath, solemn under the morning sun, and dreary with the rising of the evening wind and the drift of the night-long rain.” And concluding the chapter with a tantalizing report of their “the sound of another song, gradually swelling as though sung by men on the march. This time the melody was a piece of the plain-song of the church, familiar enough to me to bring back to my mind the great arches of some cathedral in France and the canons singing in the choir. […] None had said anything since we first heard the new-come singing, save that as we went out of the door the ballad-singer clapped me on the shoulder and said: ‘Was it not sooth that I said, brother, that Robin Hood should bring us John Ball?'” (I should look up some John Ball history and see if that “plain-song” reference is a historical allusion!)
And, we’ve now enjoyed it – thanks again!
And his Geoffrey of Monmouth one!